Photographs - Collections - Frank B. Fiske - #1952

Title: Frank B. Fiske

Dates: 1869-1947

Collection Number: 1952

Quantity: 7893 items

Abstract: Includes prints and negatives of portraits, agriculture, education, wildlife, hunting, Frank Fiske studio portraits, and some views of South Dakota. Fiske’s Native American photographs include portraits, Indian gatherings and ceremonies, boarding schools, Indian houses and dwellings, and Native American agriculture. Fiske’s documentation of daily life on the reservation includes such shots as Sioux customers waiting for a Fort Yates trading store to open; a Sioux dance in the streets of Fort Yates; a plow issue before the agency boarding school; an encampment of tipis, including those traditionally painted; and three Indian men being taxied off the reservation to join the army in WWI.

Provenance: The collection was donated by Fiske's daughter, Francine L. Peters, on July 28, 1971. The biographical sketch was written by Frank Vyzralek for the ND Heritage Foundation in December 1982.

Property Rights: The State Historical Society of North Dakota owns the property rights to this collection.

Copyrights: Copyrights to this collection remain with the donor, publisher, author, or author's heirs. Researchers should consult the 1976 Copyright Act, Public Law 94-553, Title 17, U.S. Code or an archivist at this repository if clarification of copyright requirements is needed.

Access: This collection is open under the rules and regulations of the State Historical Society of North Dakota.

Citation: Researchers are requested to cite the collection title, collection number, and the State Historical Society of North Dakota in all footnote and bibliographic references.

Numerous artifacts among Museums' collections, including (but not limited to): Fiske's cameras and equipment, photographs, and Indian artifacts.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHBy Frank Vyzralek

Frank Bennett Fiske was a rarity among those American photographers whose work has centered upon the American Indian. Unlike most such artists, Fiske was a native of the Dakotas and grew up with many of those people who later became subjects for his camera on the reservation lands bordering the Missouri River. The Sioux Indian people of the Standing Rock agency were friends, neighbors - a part of his life and upbringing.

The son of a soldier, Fiske was born June 11, 1883 at the military post of Fort Bennett (from whence came his middle name), about 30 miles north of Pierre, South Dakota, on the west bank of the Missouri. After an abortive fling at ranching, George Fiske hired on as a civilian wagon master with the U.S. Army and in the spring of 1889 moved to Fort Yates, North Dakota, where the military post coexisted with the Standing Rock Indian agency headquarters. During the decade that followed, Frank Fiske attended school both at the fort and at the boarding school for Indian children. His summers were spend herding cows for families at the post, practicing his violin, working as a cabin boy on the river boats and helping out at the post photograph gallery.

Fiske's boyhood ambition was to be a steamboat pilot and after being hired as a cabin boy he worked diligently to learn the trade. Unfortunately, boating on the Missouri River was then in its waning days; Fort Yates was an important river point only because it didn't have a railroad and was the destination of considerable government freight. Nonetheless, Fiske spent many summer hours on the river and came to know its ever-changing bends and shoals intimately.

Photography was another absorbing interest and the young Frank Fiske devoted much time to learning the business from S. T. "Dick" Fansler, operator of the post studio at Fort Yates. Most nineteenth century Army installations had such galleries usually the buildings were government property and were made available to the first photographer, transient or otherwise, who asked for its use. The Fort Yates studio had been occupied in the past by such distinguished artists as David F. Barry and Orlando Geoff. During October, 1899 Fiske learned his mentor, Fansler, would not return and successfully won permission from the commanding officer to occupy the building the following spring. Through several months short of his seventeenth birthday, Frank Fiske in 1900 had a photographic studio of his very own.

Business was good until 1903 when the military post of Fort Yates was closed down. With great expectations and even greater enthusiasm Fiske opened a studio at Bismarck; by March, 1905, he was back home again, having learned that competing with experienced photographers was far different from operating a monopoly within the narrow confines of a military post. Chastened, he concentrated on learning his craft better and began making portrait studies of the Indian, men, women and children on the Standing Rock agency. As time went on he became proficient in posing his subjects effectively and his collection of negatives grew.

At the same time his interest in the culture and history of the Sioux people developed and he began reading all he could find on the subject as well as interviewing any of the reservation old-timers who would talk to him. By 1917 he felt knowledgeable enough to publish The Taming of the Sioux, his own story of the tribe's history. Fiske's attitudes toward the Sioux, as demonstrated by his writing were generally sympathetic though probably not far different from those of most whites who were in daily contact with the tribesmen. While chafing at the government bureaucracy that grew up in the name of administering Indian affairs, he applauded the firm hand of the military which forced the Indians back to their reservations following the Ghost Dance uprising of the early 1890's. With the Army in charge "they could not remain sulky and stubborn any longer," he wrote approvingly.

Fiske saw the Standing Rock Sioux of 1917 as "good natured people" who were "not at all dissatisfied with their lot in life." He concluded his book with the opinion that "from now on the history of this once great nation promises to be very prosaic and uninteresting, indeed." These are attitudes not untypical for their day for they go far to explain why Fiske rarely photographed the Sioux in anything but the clothing and stances of the Stalwart Nineteenth Century American Indian. Caught up in the romantic residue of what had been a brutal and difficult era in American history, Fiske labored to recreate through his photograph and writings only those memories which portrayed the Indian as the noble aboriginal warrior of the misty past.

While the photography business and his studies of Indian history took up much of his time, Fiske also worked as an assistant pilot on the riverboats operated by Isaac P. Baker of Bismarck whenever his services were required from 1912 to the end of the decade. In 1918, after his attempts to enlist in the World War I army were rejected due to his age, Fiske importuned Baker to let him accompany the river steamer Scarab on a voyage down the Missouri to St. Louis during which he made a remarkable series of photos of the river in an era when it was little used as an artery of transportation. Upon arrival in St. Louise Fiske enlisted at Jefferson Barracks and was accepted but his romantic fantasies of fighting overseas were dashed. He spent the months until war's end training as a machine gunner.

In 1919 he married Angela Cournoyer, a South Dakotan descended from the fur trader Joseph Picotte. The two had known each other since 1908 when Angela visited her sister, a teacher at the Standing Rock boarding school. Angela had degrees from Haskell Institute, the University of South Dakota and the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. Following the wedding the couple settled down at Fort Yates where Angela soon found work as a substitute teacher at the reservation school. In 1921 their daughter, Francine, was born.

Business at the Fort Yates studio, with its small clientele, was never profitable enough to afford a comfortable living and now with a family to provide for Frank Fiske took what work was available. Appointed Sioux County Auditor, he served three years and was then elected to a two-year term as County Treasurer. Fiske found indoor work of that sort too confining so in 1925 the family moved the studio to McLaughlin, South Dakota, where they were in business until 1928. The following year, Frank took over Fort Yates' weekly newspaper, the Sioux County Pioneer-Arrow; the paper became sort of a family pet project for the next decade. Francine did a stint as editor during 1938-1939.

Music played an important role in the life of the Fiske family. Frank's early training on the violin made him a talented musician whose forte was the old-time "fiddling" music popular among the residents around Fort Yates. During the teens he and his sister Laura formed the nucleus of a small orchestra that played for dances, parties, and similar occasions. Angela was also an accomplished musician and she joined the band which became an important source of extra income.

Angela's interest in drama and music prompted the couple to organize plays in Fort Yates using local amateur actors. After several successes they produced "The Cry of Lone Eagle," for which Angela had written the script in 1921. With a cast made up largely of Standing Rock Indians the play toured the Dakotas and was taken to the National Folk Festival in Chicago. Another year they produced a play based on the life of Sakakawea, the Indian woman who guided Lewis and Clark across the Rocky Mountains.

Frank also found time to continue his studies of the region's past. His second book, The Life and Death of Sitting Bull, was a work of more than passing interest since he had seen, as a youngster, the Sioux leader being buried in the military cemetery at Fort Yates. In the years following World War II he gathered data for further manuscripts, including planned histories of Fort Yates and the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. During June, 1947 he combined his interest in the romantic past with his river boating experience when he and a young Fort Yates teacher, Bill Lemmons, canoed from the confluence of the Little Big Horn and Big Horn Rivers near Hardin, Montana, to the Missouri and down to Bismarck and Fort Yates. The long and difficult journey was made in order to gain insights into the experience of steamboat captain Grant Marsh, who ran the steamer Far West over the same route in the aftermath of the 1876 Little Big Horn battle.

While Frank Fiske's portraits of the Standing Rock Sioux have been well known to collectors and historians, they only gradually became familiar to the general public. Exhibitions, combined with information lectures on Sioux culture and history, such as that held in conjunction with Bismarck's annual art week in the fall of 1948 served to spread his fame. Finally, during 1950, he was honored for his Indian portraits by being made the recipient of the North Dakota Art Award. A scant two years later Frank Fiske was dead. A 1950 heart attack sent him to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Fargo for extended treatment and convalescence; a second, fatal, attack occurred in the summer of 1952 and he passed away at a Bismarck hospital on July 18.

Several years after his death the bulk of Frank Fiske's historic and Indian photographs were transferred to the State Historical Society of North Dakota in Bismarck and eventually became the property of that agency.